Handbook

This subject traces powerful and influential literary texts that have shaped our modern consciousness, most notably our embrace of the individual as a unique and unrivalled subject. Beginning with the Romantic poets — William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats — we examine a poetic imagination that elevates the artist-poet above the common fray, a manoeuvre that prioritises subjective experience. The focus then extends to an exploration of extended prose fictions that further dramatise the intensity of human experience. The works of celebrated Victorian authors including Jane Austen and George Eliot are explored in tracing a growing fascination with human experience and psychology.